NYT 1979 Finkelstein | A Political Pollster For Conservatives

Dec. 16, 1979 | nytimes.com

ARTHUR J. FINKELSTEIN of Armonk stands out from the new breed of political consultants and pollsters on three counts. He says he does not like publicity; he is staunchly conservative, and he has more than his share of critics among his fellow campaign consultants.

At the relatively young age of 34, Mr. Finkelstein might be the enfant terrible of the often mysterious business of political consulting and polling.

Mr. Finkelstein, whose office is in Mount Kisco and whose home is in Armonk, has been in the business, primarily but not exclusively polling, for 10 years. He is now involved in the hotly contested Republican Presidential campaign as a consultant for Ronald Reagan, who is generally acknowledged to be the front‐runner for the Republican Presidential nomination.

He has just completed a poll for the Reagan forces in Iowa, where caucuses to select delegates next month will provide the campaign's first clear test of strength for both Democratic and Republican Presidential contenders.

But, typically for Mr. Finkelstein, there is more than meets in the eye in his relationship with the Reagan camp. Several Reagan aides acknowledged privately that Mr. Finkelstein had been retained at least partly to keep him out of other campaigns.

At least one other Republican Presidential candidate, George Bush, had sought Mr. Finkelstein's services after he left the campaign of Representative Philip M. Crane of Illinois, the most conservative of the Republican candidates and the one most ideologically compatible with Mr. Finkelstein.

The pollster has also worked for the Free Libertarian Party, which is even farther to the right.

Mr. Finkelstein and other campaign aides left the Crane organization because of what they said was interference by the candidate's wife, Arlene —not an uncommon occurrence.

Mr. Finkelstein noted that there were three kinds of candidates' wives — the wife “who hates politics and refuses to come out of the house,” the wife who is reluctant but “will do what she is asked,” and the wife “who wants to be the candidate and loves politics more than her husband does.” He puts Rosalynn Carter, as well as Mrs. Crane, in the last category.

Mr. Finkelstein's association with conservatives — “the hard‐line right,” some of his critics say — has been profitable. He has been closely linked to the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which helps finance the campaigns of conservative candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives.

• Mr. Finkelstein said that he would be working as a pollster, campaign strategist or both in Senate campaigns next year in Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oklahoma and possibly other states, including Connecticut, where James L. Buckley has just announced his Senate candidacy.

• Mr. Finkelstein added that he would also be working, primarily polling, in about 50 House contests.

• Although he denies that he is “a hard‐core right‐winger,” Mr. Finkelstein said that there was hardly “a serious conservative figure over the last 10 years whom I haven't been involved with.”

• His political ideology is often cited by his critics. “He is extremely opinionated,” said a campaign consultant who has worked with Mr. Finkelstein. Yet, he and other critics acknowledge that Mr. Finkelstein is “a very bright guy.”

• Mr. Finkelstein comes on strong with his personality as well. “He's a fasttalker, he runs fast and he's out to make a lot of money,” said Anthony Noto, the presiding officer of the Suffolk County Legislature, who worked briefly with Mr. Finkelstein. “If you don't have the bucks,” Mr. Noto said, “you'll only see him once in a while.”

• “I'm not a local guy,” Mr. Finkelstein said with a trace of impatience. Even in his home base of Westchester he has done little work, except as a poll taker for the State Senate Republicans. In that role, he surveyed State Senate districts in which the contests were likely to be close.

• In Suffolk County on Long Island, Mr. Noto and other Republicans have criticized Mr. Finkelstein for devising the strategy in which the County Exec utive, John V. N. Klein, publicly took responsibility for the Suffolk sewer scandals and, in effect, fell on the mercy of the voters.

• It didn't work. Mr. Noto and other Klein critics were supposed to then rally around Mr. Klein, praising his integrity. Instead, they seized on his admission to mount a successful challenge of his renomination in the Republican primary last September.

• Strong support for Mr. Finkelstein comes from Joseph M. Margiotta, the Nassau County Republican chairman, who has retained Mr. Finkelstein on an annual basis since 1973.

• “He's one of the brightest fellows I know,” Mr. Margiotta said, adding that Suffolk Republican politicians were making Mr. Finkelstein “a scapegoat” for the Klein defeat. He noted that in the county executive contest in Nassau two years ago, Mr. Finkelstein provided the polling data that led Mr. Margiotta to conclude that the incumbent, Ralph G. Caso, could not be reelected. Mr. Margiotta then “dumped” Mr. Caso and backed Francis T. Purcell, who went on to win the Republican primary and the election.

• Mr. Finkelstein, who has a sharp sense of humor, took the Margiotta praise in stride: “I'm a hero, but the first time a town clerk loses an election after my figures show him winning, I will be over the hill and a bum.”

• But with prodding, Mr. Finkelstein acknowledges a six‐figure income and says he spends more time in airplanes and airport lounges than he does in either Mount Kisco or Armonk.

He began polling as a protege of F. Clifton White, the longtime Republican campaign consultant, who lives in Rye. But the two have had a falling out, and Mr. White is clearly not a Finkelstein fan.

Mr. Finkelstein was a political professional in State Senator John J. Marchi's campaign for the New York City mayoralty in 1969 and was active in James L. Buckley's surprisingly successful campaign for the United States Senate in New York in 1970. ■

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/16/archives/westchester-weekly-a-political-pollster-for-conservatives-a.html

1999apr25 NYT Finkelstein | Sound Bites Over Jerusalem

By Adam Nagourney

April 25, 1999, Section 6,Page 42 | New York Times Magazine

It was a warm and sunny Saturday morning, the heart of the Sabbath, and most of Jerusalem was shuttered -- except for a second-floor corner suite in the King David Hotel, looking out over the Jaffa Gate and the rough stone walls guarding the Old City. Inside, the fax machine beeped, a cell phone trilled and Israeli newspapers and campaign memos were scattered across the floor. An easel displaying scribbled poll numbers was perched in a corner, and dirty plates, half-filled coffee cups and wineglasses littered the tables, the remnants of 12 hours of breakfast and dinner meetings. There was no sign on the door, but the suite served as the headquarters for the re-election campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, if only for one reason: Arthur J. Finkelstein, the Republican political consultant from the United States, was in Jerusalem today, and this is where he was staying.

Finkelstein himself seemed tense and preoccupied as he opened the door to his suite. Netanyahu's main opponent in the May 17 election, the Labor Party candidate Ehud Barak, had recently announced on television that, if elected, he would withdraw all Israeli troops from Lebanon by the middle of 2000. ''His secret plan to end the war in Lebanon -- it's absolutely Nixon,'' Finkelstein says caustically as he pours a cup of coffee, recalling Richard Nixon's 1972 promise to end the war in Vietnam. Barak's pledge was sketchy, but coming at the end of an anxious week in which three Israeli soldiers died in Lebanon, it had captured the public's attention.

Even before he left the United States for Jerusalem, Finkelstein had ordered the Likud campaign into action: it conducted a poll of Israeli voters on Barak's pledge and his party's surprisingly vivid suggestion that Netanyahu was ''stuck in the Lebanon mud.'' The results were waiting for Finkelstein when he checked into the King David. By a margin of ''better than 2 to 1,'' Finkelstein says, voters saw the Barak declaration as politics as usual. This finding guided the response Netanyahu and Finkelstein scripted that weekend. The Prime Minister would not even pretend to address the issue directly, but would instead attack the character of his opponent for raising it, underscoring what Netanyahu wants to be the campaign's central question: Which of these two men is tough and steady enough to assure Israel's survival?

Over the course of the weekend they drafted the slogan, ''Ehud Barak: Too Many Ambitions, Too Few Principles.'' By Monday morning -- with Finkelstein back in the United States -- those words would be posted on the wall of Netanyahu's party headquarters, published in his newspaper advertisements and incorporated into the daily talking points that guide his cabinet ministers' conversations with Israeli reporters.

Finkelstein did not know it, but the attack he was responding to that weekend was largely the handiwork of another American political consultant, one he has never met and does not particularly admire, but who is also working in Israel this spring. James Carville had flown to Tel Aviv two weeks earlier to join Bob Shrum -- one of two other Washington consultants working for Barak -- to present the American recommendations on how the Labor Party challenger could boost his struggling campaign. Seize control of the daily debate, said the Americans -- Carville, Shrum and Stanley Greenberg, who was President Clinton's pollster in 1992 and is Barak's pollster now.

Speak in short, declarative sentences and jettison the bulky arguments that had been the quaint mainstay of Israeli political dialogue. Every interview, every speech, must include a fundamental assault on those parts of Netanyahu's record where three months of polling had found voters' reservations to be most pronounced. ''Netanyahu,'' said Carville, ''is stuck.'' He was stuck on the economy, stuck on the peace process, stuck in how he ran his Government. And. . .stuck in the Lebanon mud.

American consultants have been flying in and out of Israel since Prime Minister Menachem Begin called in David Garth of New York in 1981, playing a low-key (and not particularly significant) role in how campaigns are conducted.

But this year's contest -- which many politicians think will most likely be decided by no more than a percentage point or two and seems sure to result in a June 1 runoff -- is different.

Sound bites, rapid response, repetition, wedge issues, ethnic exploitation, nightly polling, negative research, searing attack advertisements on television -- the familiar tools of American elections have now arrived in the Middle East.

The 1999 contest for Prime Minister of Israel is providing a stage for a struggle between the seminal Democratic and Republican consultants of the past 15 years, the principal architects of what has become the signature American style of political discourse -- one that rewards simplicity over complexity, shock over substance and Election Day victory over governing and nearly everything else. (The third major candidate in the Israeli race, Yitzhak Mordechai of the new Center Party, has not retained his own American consultant for one reason, an aide said: he can't afford it.)

The evidence of the Americans' influence piles up with each passing campaign day. An Israeli news cycle hardly ever goes by now without Barak describing Netanyahu's Government as ''stuck,'' as Barak tries to anchor the election in domestic and economic issues. Or without Netanyahu calling Barak a ''leftist'' or weak, as Netanyahu for a second time presents himself as the candidate best able to assure Israel's security. Both sides' attacks are the products of exhaustive surveys and focus groups. The orientation of Barak's campaign staff even includes a viewing of ''The War Room,'' the 92-minute documentary that glorified the tactical inner workings of the 1992 Clinton campaign; Carville flew in to officiate after the Barak war room opened in a nondescript office building in southern Tel Aviv.

Finkelstein, Carville, Shrum and Greenberg are treated as something of celebrities in Israel, almost as likely to end up on the front pages of the local newspapers as the candidates themselves. In this environment, should it really come as such a surprise to learn that the less-than-telegenic Ehud Barak has started to bring a makeup artist with him on his campaign trips? Or that in assailing Netanyahu, Barak has invoked the line ''too many lies for too long'' -- the very same slogan that Democrats in the United States used so successfully last fall against another Finkelstein client, Alfonse M. D'Amato?

In America, the notion of politics as spectacle may be distasteful and dispiriting to watch, but it is hardly a threat to the Republic. Israel, however, is a young and still somewhat tentative nation -- Arthur Finkelstein was 2 years old when the independent State of Israel was founded in 1948 -- and it is embarking on only its second direct election of a Prime Minister.

It's a place where teachers snap a gun onto their waistbands for protection before taking children on an outing in the country, and where shoppers carrying knapsacks are routinely searched going into a supermarket to make sure they're not about to deposit a bomb next to the cereal boxes. It's a place where citizens flick on the radio every hour to hear if a soldier they know has been killed in Lebanon, and animosity between Jew and Jew -- between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazi, between the secular and the religious -- can be as raw as that between Arab and Jew. In Israel, the pace of the impending election can be measured by the rise in random stabbings around the Jewish and Muslim quarters of Jerusalem.

Israel is, in short, a nation that passes most of its days right on the edge -- riding 4,000 years of religious, ethnic and tribal turmoil. The American consultants describe this overstimulated and chronically anxious environment as more intense than any they have worked in before. Elections here are literally fought over life-and-death issues, and so it is that many Israelis are coming to believe that something disturbing is happening to their political system this spring.

Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, says the new style of campaigning has created ''a distorted and irrelevant form of politics'' -- an unhappy and increasingly prevalent view of the new Israeli political landscape that would certainly sound familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of American elections. ''Because of the Americanization of the campaign, it boils down to slogans instead of to substance,'' says David Bar-Illan, a former editor of The Jerusalem Post who is Netanyahu's director of communications. ''And nothing is more typically American than boiling down issues to slogans and really almost emptying them of meaning.''

STYLE: CARVILLE

Be happy, ladies and gentlemen!'' James Carville looms over his salad in a small Italian restaurant on a side street in Tel Aviv, swirling a second tumbler of Scotch. His audience is a table of Israeli and American political consultants working for the Barak campaign, and Carville has just learned that Netanyahu boasted on television the night before about a sunny new round of economic statistics.

"Mr. Netanyahu says it's over, we're all rich!'' Carville proclaims to the rather startled patrons of Pronto, his eyes wide and darting around the room, and his Louisiana accent stretched out by the fatigue settling in after 18 hours in the air. ''We're on Wall Street! Beverly Hills! The land of milk and honey! Moses has found it!''

Carville, in the fifth hour of only his third trip to Israel, paused to make sure that he had not crossed any lines, as Israelis turned in their seats to take in this uniquely American show.

"Milk and honey!'' he continues exuberantly. ''Netanyahu has willed it and deemed it. We are here -- finally. After all these years, 4,000 years. We're here now and Bibi has led us and we are fine. We don't have 12 percent unemployment, because he says we don't. We don't have a divided nation, because he says we don't. We don't have money going to yeshivas for the haredim, instead of schools, because he says we don't. IT [pause] IS [pause] ALL [pause] FINE.''

For a moment it seems like a late February night in 1992 at the Sheraton Wayfarer bar in New Hampshire -- except here James Carville is talking about yeshivas and ultrareligious Jews. These Tel Aviv diners have just heard a dress rehearsal of the campaign that Carville and Shrum will direct against Benjamin Netanyahu in the weeks ahead.

It is hard to imagine two more distinct and politically influential characters -- stylistically, personally and ideologically -- than James Carville and Arthur Finkelstein. Carville is delighted by the attention he has attracted in Israel, just as he has luxuriated in his celebrity since 1992, when the American television cameras first picked out his lanky figure and bizarrely expressive face in the entourage surrounding Bill Clinton in New Hampshire. Partly because of his continuing association with an American President, and partly because of his seemingly ceaseless presence on television, Carville is recognized in Tel Aviv almost as readily as he is in New York. The first time Barak appeared with his American team, the candidate was reduced to the role of onlooker at his own news conference by reporters clamoring for a word with the famous and funny friend of President Clinton.

STYLE: FINKELSTEIN

Arthur Finkelstein flees public exposure just as surely as James Carville embraces it. A few hours earlier on the day Carville put on his impromptu show for those restaurant patrons, a very different scene had unfolded 30 miles to the east, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Arthur Finkelstein had checked in for a weekend of meetings with Netanyahu. The visit of the American whom the newspapers irreverently call ''the Mysterious Arthur,'' and who uses an assumed name when he registers at a hotel, was unannounced, as always. But this time, an Israeli photographer, tipped off to his presence, waited in the lobby for five hours until Finkelstein emerged from the elevator. The next morning, simple photographic evidence of Finkelstein's existence in Jerusalem merited a spot on the front page of Maariv, one of the nation's main newspapers.

Finkelstein has vigilantly fought public exposure since he entered American politics in 1964, working for a Republican Congressional candidate from Queens the year that Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson, an outcome Finkelstein laments to this day. He resisted the curiosity that mounted after he helped direct D'Amato's election to the Senate in 1980 by disparaging Senator Jacob Javits, a venerated Republican from New York, as old and ailing. And he kept his enigmatic distance through the 1980's, as his reputation as a devastating strategist and pollster grew with each new victory -- before beginning to fade in the mid-1990's with a series of equally ignoble defeats.

At once brash and shy, Finkelstein craves recognition for his accomplishments, yet detests attention and resents the way he is depicted in the American press. ''I'm portrayed as a cartoon,'' he says. Yet he has not done much to counter that impression. He hates speaking in public and resists being photographed. At Finkelstein's insistence, his 1996 contract with the Likud Party reportedly included a provision that prohibited anyone from disclosing his position in the campaign, though inevitably, word of Netanyahu's secret American consultant leaked out. Despite his best efforts, Finkelstein has become an extraordinarily public figure. His name is even used as a verb to describe American campaign tactics. ''People in focus groups will talk about Finkelstein,'' says Stan Greenberg, a note of amazement in his voice. ''This is the only country in the world I've been to where they talk about the consultants by name.''

FINKELSTEIN: PERSONAL PRIVACY FOR HIMSELF

In the last election Netanyahu suggested that Finkelstein keep a low profile, but the Prime Minister has reconsidered matters in 1999. Netanyahu, who lighted up at the mention of Finkelstein's name as he sipped espresso in his office in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, said he had advised his American adviser to dispel his rather severe image by allowing himself to become better known. ''I thought it was important to demystify him,'' Netanyahu says, toying with a cigar on his desk that he chose not to light after he took note of the presence of a magazine photographer in the room. ''It's very funny: he's just a very nice and warm and actually very likable person, completely antithetical to this demonic, manipulative, craven personality that you see in the press.'' And so, Finkelstein has met with 10 or so of Netanyahu's cabinet ministers, and agreed to sit down with a tenacious 27-year-old Israeli journalist, Boaz Gaon, who had been lobbying him for three years for a meeting.

Not that Finkelstein is happy about it. He was smiling when he opened the door to his suite for an interview one Saturday morning, but he still had the look of a man who was about to settle into a dentist chair. ''I don't want this,'' Finkelstein says, gazing out his window at the mountains of Jordan in the distance, from a room in which he can hear the first Muslim calls to prayer before sunrise, relayed over the screechy speakers mounted atop mosques across the Old City. ''I'm shocked by your interest,'' Finkelstein continues. ''In fact, I am appalled.''

There are, Finkelstein's friends say, two reasons why he has chosen to remain behind the curtain.

The first is that Finkelstein, who has been running campaigns longer than any other national consultant working today, adheres to what has become an old-fashioned view of the business in the age of the war room and the Sunday-morning talk circuit. Consultants, he argues, receive too much attention and too much credit. ''I think I'm the playwright or the director, and not the actor,'' Finkelstein says, pouring a guest a cup of coffee. ''And the actors need to be onstage, not the director. And I think it's absurd that people who do what I do become as important, as celebrated, as the ones who are running.''

The second explanation for Finkelstein's reserve is that he is intent on guarding his private life. Three years ago, he agreed to what he now asserts was an off-the-record meeting with a reporter for Boston Magazine; the sessions produced a published account that Finkelstein, who has more than once represented clients who were against gay rights, is homosexual and lives with his partner in Massachusetts. The disclosure encouraged more unwanted scrutiny. For Finkelstein, who resists even simple questions about how many siblings he has (two brothers), the Boston Magazine story was, his friends say, mortifying.

FINKELSTEIN: BLAME THE ELITES for Arthur's DISRUPTIONS

In shunning attention, Finkelstein is apt to dismiss the notion that he altered the Israeli political terrain. In some of his more cantankerous moments -- there are many -- he even disputes the suggestion that he is one of the reasons that Benjamin Netanyahu is Prime Minister of Israel today. ''The elites were appalled that he'' -- Shimon Peres -- ''lost, so they needed a reason,'' Finkelstein says. ''It couldn't be that Netanyahu was good, or that people believed in the candidate, so it must be something ominous. Remember, Netanyahu won last time by what, three-tenths of a percentage point? Had the bob of a head been the other way, he would have lost, and the elites would have said how Finkelstein didn't know anything and he destroyed Likud, blah, blah, blah. It is so silly.''

What's a view of the last election that Finkelstein may be alone in holding. By almost every account -- including those of Netanyahu and Barak -- Finkelstein has had a profound effect on the way campaigns are conducted in Israel since he packed 32 years of American political skills and experience into his suitcase and flew into Tel Aviv airport three years ago. In the United States, he is known as a consultant who demands broad authority over the campaigns that seek his counsel -- ''I've got to act like chairman of the board,'' he tells his clients -- and the pattern has followed him across the globe. Finkelstein was hardly an incidental player in the 1996 campaign. ''Listen to him because he's talking for me,'' Netanyahu told his staff.

FINKELSTEIN & BIBI: REWRITING THE RULES OF THE GAME (POLITICS)

To appreciate the extent to which Finkelstein and Netanyahu rewrote the rules of Israeli politics, it is necessary to understand two central facts about the nation's electoral system. In 1996, for the first time, Israelis voted directly for Prime Minister rather than casting a vote for their preferred political parties. The person who became Prime Minister was generally at the top of a list of candidates prepared in advance by the party that wins the most votes. This switch from parliamentary to popular vote made the candidate for Prime Minister the focus of the election, and put a premium on personal appeal and television skills. By 1996, Netanyahu had appeared on ''Nightline'' virtually as often as James Carville; no other Israeli politicians could match his ease before the camera. It would have been hard to envision an electoral reform that played more to Netanyahu's strengths, or to Shimon Peres's weaknesses.

The other thing to keep in mind are the restrictions imposed in Israel on political advertisements. Television commercials are permitted only in the final three weeks of the campaign; before that, candidates and parties are restricted to a limited number of billboard and small newspaper advertisements. Once the television campaign begins, the ads are shown nightly, in a single block of varying length. Before 1996, the parties used this time for unhurried, literate advertisements, devoted to the issue of the day. The advertisements would usually appear exactly once, and every night, campaign staffs would head to the editing machines to produce a new ad for the following evening, often responding to what the opposition just said. Israelis settle in to watch this nightly block, which begins tomorrow, as eagerly as if it were, say, a season-ending episode of ''Ally McBeal.'' The process provided for what was, in effect, a rolling, nightly debate.

The custom struck Netanyahu as absurd. ''The way political campaigns were run in Israel -- including ones I took part in -- was bizarre,'' Netanyahu says, ''because we wasted a lot of energy to-ing and fro-ing and not getting the message through. And therefore I sought to bring in American professionals who could help focus the message.'' The American professional whom Netanyahu brought in was Arthur Finkelstein, who promptly decreed that the campaign would produce a handful of short, simple ads and broadcast them over and over, day after day and even back to back on the same night, just as it was done in the United States. ''Arthur used to hold a videocassette and say, 'We can win the election with this one only,''' says Ron Assouline, an Israeli who produced advertisements for Netanyahu in 1996, and is working for Barak this year.

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The ads were provocative and constructed on an unwavering message: that Netanyahu alone could guarantee the nation's security and survival, that peace could come only through strength, that ''Peres will divide Jerusalem.'' The most oft-repeated advertisement was only 15 seconds long; it displayed an animated glass wall which slowly shattered to reveal a film clip of Yasir Arafat leading Peres by the hand up a set of stairs. ''A dangerous combination for Israel,'' the announcer said. A second ad was 25 seconds long, and depicted the smoky aftermath of the bombing of the No. 18 bus in Jerusalem, one of a series of Palestinian terror attacks that set the stage for the election that followed the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. ''No security. No peace. No reason to vote for Peres,'' the announcer said over the chilling wail of police sirens. It was unlike anything the Israeli electorate had ever seen before; the ad seized on an event that had traumatized the nation, presenting a case for Netanyahu's candidacy in the most stark and arresting manner imaginable.

''Survival of Israel has always been the No. 1 concern,'' Finkelstein says, explaining the rationale of Netanyahu's candidacy and, really, his entire prime ministry. ''It has been since the very beginning of this country, and it still is. Because unlike in the United States, where we have a plethora of issues, here we have one core fact: That tomorrow they could cease to exist.''

Everything in the Netanyahu campaign reinforced that appeal. No matter what Shimon Peres said about Netanyahu, no matter the pressure from more traditional Likudniks, who every night questioned Limor Livnat, Netanyahu's campaign manager, about the unfamiliar tactics being dictated by an American political consultant 5,000 miles away. The campaign stuck to its script, confirming its progress with nightly polls that led Finkelstein alone to predict Netanyahu's victory almost by the precise margin. ''When he came to us with this idea, I said, 'Oh, my God, how come we didn't think about it before he came?''' Livnat says. ''It looks so obvious. But I had to struggle every night to convince them'' -- the other Likud leaders -- ''this was the right thing to do.''

Finkelstein asserts that the limits imposed by the Israeli system, which he curtly describes as ''a throwback to the old socialist world,'' made it impossible for him to do in Israel what he does in America. ''You can't bring American techniques to Israel,'' he says. ''It's a whole different field of play here.'' But that restrictive political environment, Netanyahu says, put a premium on Finkelstein's communication skills and made him central to the victory in 1996, and it is why he has kept the American so close at hand ever since. Netanyahu calls Finkelstein the ''needle'' that allowed him to thread his ''contrary message'' through the narrow opening left by a restrictive political system and a hostile press corps.

The ultimate proof of Finkelstein's influence would come after Labor absorbed the shock of its loss. There was no doubt how the party would approach a rematch with Netanyahu. It would start with American political consultants. ''In 1996 we were attacked and attacked and attacked and we didn't answer,'' says Tal Silberstein, a 29-year-old industrial engineer who is managing Barak's campaign, speaking from the Barak war room. ''It's not going to be that way any longer. We're not going to let them accuse us or General Barak without a very quick and harsh and blunt response.''

Jaunty and confident, Carville, Shrum and Greenberg settled in before the television camera to discuss the campaign with an Israeli journalist. It was mid-December, the first time the three Washington consultants to Barak had been in Israel at the same time, and the fact that they were about to discuss their roles on national television signaled how rapidly things had changed in Israel. Before this interview, American political consultants, mindful of Israeli candidates' sensitivities about being too closely associated with them, had lain low. Already, half a year before the election, Netanyahu advisers were implying White House meddling in an Israeli election, given the close ties between the United States President and Barak's three consultants. (Shrum was one of the main speechwriters for Clinton's State of the Union speech this year.) And Barak supporters were countering that Finkelstein had excessive influence on the head of government.

CARVILLE'S CALLOUS DISREGRAD FOR REALITY OF ISRAELI SOCIETY

But in a country where there is a Planet Hollywood overlooking the Mediterranean, and where Bruce Springsteen songs roar out of passing taxis in Jerusalem -- indeed, where American culture is far more celebrated than it is scorned -- how upset would the public really be over one more foreign import? So Carville, Shrum and Greenberg registered under their own names at their seaside Tel Aviv hotel. The Barak campaign invited a photographer to take a picture of Greenberg eating falafel. The trio even held a public seminar devoted to the subject of the modern campaign. There was calculation in all this openness. ''We sent them all over the place to do interviews,'' says Alon Pinkas, one of Barak's Israeli advisers. ''As opposed to the shadowy, back-room, smoke-filled Arthur Finkelstein.''

But that first television interview provided the Americans with a taste of the complexities inherent in their newest assignment. What, the television journalist Haim Hecht asked Carville as the cameras rolled, was his view of how Barak handled the military training accident at the Ze'elim training grounds seven years ago, in which five soldiers were killed by an errant missile? Newspaper accounts and Likud leaders had charged that Barak had fled the scene in a helicopter before the wounded were attended to, and Netanyahu supporters had been invoking the episode to portray Barak as weak. But Carville, one of the most nimble guests on the Sunday talk shows in Washington, was flustered by the query about his new client's record. He whispered a confused question to Stan Greenberg, seated at his side. ''It's an accusation that's been cleared,'' Greenberg said uncomfortably. (Actually, that response was perhaps questionable at the time, though the state comptroller's report issued three months later would exonerate Barak.)

Hecht, speaking in rapid English, pressed on: What did Carville think of Aryeh Deri, the head of the ultrareligious Shas Party, the nation's third-largest? Deri was under indictment in a case that had come to personify the deep, tribal animosity between Sephardic (and mostly religious) and Ashkenazi (and mostly secular) Jews. Carville, flummoxed again, shrugged and offered a weak smile. ''I don't know,'' he said. Bob Shrum intervened. ''I don't think we pretend that we're somehow or other experts on Israel,'' he said. ''We're here to help General Barak.''

There was, no doubt, a scent of a journalistic ambush to the exchanges. As Carville said later, recalling the appearance, it was his first trip to Israel, and he could scarcely understand what Hecht was saying. But while the questions were sophisticated, they were also central to the campaign, and the faltering performance caught many Israelis by surprise. Israel is a country that is captivated by public events in general and politics in particular: 80 percent of the voting population participates in national elections, compared with 49 percent of registered voters in the United States. In a country with a population significantly smaller than New York City's, there are four major daily newspapers. People read about and analyze their government and its leaders every day, so Carville's apparent ignorance was noted. ''It was not very impressive,'' says Shilo de-Beer, head of the news desk at Yedioth Ahronoth, the nation's largest newspaper. ''It was a very straightforward question, like, 'Who is the press secretary of the White House?' It was an embarrassing interview.''

The television appearance had been intended to show off Barak's American arsenal. Instead, it highlighted fundamental questions that have been raised about the transplanted American political talent. Are political skills transferable? Do tactics and strategies that work in New Hampshire work in Israel or, for that matter, in other countries where American campaign advisers ply their trade? Does a Carville or a Finkelstein really need to know who an Aryeh Deri is?

CANDIDATE: BIBI

''The question is, does someone who comes from American political consulting, can he translate that to this?'' says Netanyahu. ''The answer is -- of course, if he's done enough of them. It's like a country doctor versus some guy in the Mayo Clinic. How many campaigns have consultants here done -- what, six, seven, eight elections at most? Somebody who has done hundreds of elections, a doctor who has performed hundreds of operations, he's better at it.''

CANDIDATE EHUD BARAK

Barak makes much the same argument. ''The Americans are good,'' he says, sitting at a table with Shrum and Carville. ''The American political culture, they have elections, you know, it's a continuing process of election. Here we elect a Prime Minister and members of Knesset. Over there you are electing sheriffs, judges, Congress members. So an expertise emerged of running a campaign. And we don't have too much experience here. And I'm hearing from our best strategists, and best media teams, and best pollsters, they are telling me, 'Compared to Americans, we are amateurs.'''

FINKELSTEIN: More attuned to psychology than Carville?

When Finkelstein arrived in Israel in 1996, his knowledge of the country's politics amounted to ''what the average readers of The New York Times would know in New York,'' says Eyal Arad, who was a senior Netanyahu adviser at the time. It is an assessment that Finkelstein neither disputes nor apologizes for. ''Look, it doesn't matter if I get it or not,'' he says. ''If I go to Iowa, they'll say: 'How can you understand Iowa? You're from New York.' And I'll say: 'I don't need to understand Iowa. That's not the point. That's not what I do.' You find the intersections of interests -- you take a survey, you find out what people care about, you find out what your candidate cares about, you find the intersection of those two points, and that's what you talk about. What difference does it make if I understand it or not?''

That said, Finkelstein did spend five weeks of his 18th year working on a kibbutz near Jerusalem and shares the emotional identification many American Jews have with the country's struggle for existence. ''I understood that being Jewish meant that we were always at the edge of extinction as a people,'' Finkelstein says. ''And survival was a fundamental quest in the Jewish person. The reason that Israel was important was because it was a place for Jews to survive. It was a place for Jews to go. And remember, I'm very much a product of the postwar mentality, of the movie 'Exodus': there needs to be a place to go. And this was the place.''

By contrast, Carville is Roman Catholic and has not, he says, made any particular effort to tutor himself on Israel's history and politics in preparation for this job. ''The Israelis understand their history better than anyone else,'' Carville says, settling in for a nightcap by the dying embers of a fire at his Virginia farmhouse one January evening.

''No one is going to say, 'Give me a 500-word essay on the causes, the strategies and the long-range results of the '67 war, the '73 war.' That's just not what's important. I mean, it's important but it's not important to my role. They are not looking to me for advice on Israel. They are looking to me for advice on communications, on organizations, on how to set things up, on how to respond.

''You've got to be careful,'' Carville adds. ''I think in a campaign or a situation like this, when everyone else knows so much, I think there's a point in politics where knowledge becomes a burden.''

STRATEGY: Doesn't Finkelstein's micro-targeting require knowledge of society?

And yet there is a case to be made that in Israel, knowledge is the most important, if not the only, tool for unraveling the tangle of religion, culture, tribes, politics, tradition and animosities that provide the backdrop for the nation's everyday existence. Carville, for example, was surprised to discover that candidates avoid campaigning on the Sabbath so as not to offend observant Jews.

Finkelstein, meanwhile, got an unexpected lesson when he helped Netanyahu come up with the slogan, ''A Strong Leader for a Strong Country.'' It was tame stuff by American standards.

But the Prime Minister was accused of invoking language reminiscent of Fascist propaganda, a demonstration in how memories of World War II remain vivid across much of Israel.

When Carville and Shrum referred to their candidate as General Barak -- an elementary tactic designed to remind voters that Barak's military career argues against the portrayal of him as weak -- they, too, hit a cultural wall. ''I'll take the chutzpah to give you advice, and I won't charge you for it,'' Haim Hecht told Shrum, Carville and Greenberg at the end of their televised discussion about ''Ehud,'' as Hecht called the candidate. ''Drop the 'General' bit. It won't fly here.''

HEBREW LANGUAGE BARRIERS / LITTLE TIME IN COUNTRY

None of the American consultants speak Hebrew; in fact, only Greenberg and Finkelstein are Jewish, though some Israelis incorrectly assume that Shrum is, because of the sound of his name. ''It's not a problem, except Carville is Southern,'' says Doron Cohen, Barak's brother-in-law and senior adviser, joking away the whole issue. ''His Southern accent is almost non-English to us.'' But as a practical matter, the language difference creates a constant barrier between the consultants and their clients. A translator attends the focus groups organized by Labor pollsters. Shrum and Finkelstein tap out advertising scripts in English, which are then translated into Hebrew. The Americans awake to daily English translations of the Israeli newspapers and morning radio reports, and they each have a full-time, Hebrew-speaking American assistant on the ground to monitor events. Although Israeli firms make the actual nightly polling calls, it's Finkelstein and Greenberg who analyze the (translated) results -- an expertise that, they and their clients maintain, crosses language barriers and is one of the reasons they are considered valuable in Israel.

Yet inevitably, despite their best efforts, the Americans are working behind glass, unable to absorb street chatter or appreciate the stray magazine headline, the ambient clues that might signal the changing dynamic of a campaign. ''I really don't see how someone who does not know the language and does not know the people can give advice,'' says Mina Zemach, an Israeli pollster. When Carville met with a group of Israeli political reporters the other day, he sat back in his chair, his eyes rolling in his head, as the reporters and Barak advisers argued in Hebrew over the ground rules of the briefing, one another's questions and even about Carville's responses.

The consultants also are not around all that much. Finkelstein came to Israel about six times in 1996, usually staying for two or three days on each visit, which amounts to barely twice the hours he spent on his commute. Carville has spent far less time in Israel than his Barak employees would like, as he juggles a presidential race in Argentina, a demanding television and speech schedule and rearing two young children with his wife, Mary Matalin, the Republican consultant -- who is, yes, a Netanyahu supporter.

Greenberg, meanwhile, is swimming in the transcontinental demands of his political portfolio. ''I have the Scottish elections on the sixth of May,'' he said over breakfast after arriving in Tel Aviv from London in late February. ''I've got this election on the 17th of May. I've got the South African elections, whose date is not firm, but whose date is either May 23 or May 29. In Britain, I've got the European elections and local council elections on June 1. And I've got the runoff here.''

By American standards, the consultants are not paid a huge amount of money considering the time it takes just to get to work. In the United States, consultants typically get a percentage of campaign money expended on television advertising, a figure that in a big race can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In Israel, Finkelstein says, he is paid $4,000 a month; Barak's campaign manager, Tal Silberstein, says the three American consultants will collect $400,000 among them for their work in Israel.

The traveling-salesman image of these consultants shapes the way they are perceived in Israel, and not necessarily for the better. ''I am amenable to any questions, to whatever the campaign wants me to do,'' Carville said as he opened a news briefing one Sunday morning.

''As long as you are on your plane in two hours,'' responded a political correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth, Nehama Duek, casting a pointed grin in his direction. Even James Carville was silenced by that remark; Duek was off by only 10 hours.

The American consultants have spent four months preparing for the 22 days leading up to the May 17 election, as well as the subsequent weeks before the likely June 1 runoff. Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers have tried to turn the election into a referendum on who can best protect Israel's security, suggesting that Barak cannot stand up against a peace process that threatens to place a Palestinian state on Israel's eastern border. ''Netanyahu: A Strong Leader for Israel's Future,'' asserts what will presumably be the Prime Minister's main re-election slogan, unveiled after Finkelstein visited Jerusalem just before Passover.

Barak and his advisers are trying to turn the election on Israel's sluggish economy. ''I say to Netanyahu,'' Barak declared to an exuberant crowd of supporters late last month, ''you haven't given a decent living -- you won't get votes. You haven't given housing -- you won't get votes. You haven't given education -- you won't get votes.''

To critics of the Americans' role here, these last three weeks will be the climax of the conversion of a crucial electoral process into a political version of the Coke and Pepsi taste-off, a generic clash of American weapons and tactics, staged on foreign soil. The candidates and their consultants dispute this, of course, and there's no question that all parties believe in something more than victory for victory's sake. From the fiercely ideological Finkelstein, a libertarian who warmly recalls his tutelage under Ayn Rand, to the staunchly liberal Bob Shrum, a longtime friend of and speech writer for Ted Kennedy, the American consultants have strongly held political views. Throughout their long careers, each has worked only for candidates who will advance those views in government. For his part, Carville lets a look of total incredulity answer an Israeli reporter's inquiry as to whether he could see himself advising Netanyahu someday.

Finkelstein passionately advocates the Likud ideology, tying it to the conservative views he preached to his surprised Democratic parents over the dinner table, growing up in Brooklyn and Levittown, N.Y. ''Netanyahu represents, in my view, a movement into 20th-century freedom concepts, as opposed to big-government concepts,'' Finkelstein contends. ''Labor is the party of the old socialist wing. Likud represents the breakaway from the old socialist views.'' He adds: ''I would not be good if I did this without some passion. I have to care about either the person I'm dealing with or the issues I'm dealing with.''

But is this really the discussion Israeli voters have heard this spring? Do the tactics that the American consultants have grafted onto the Israeli political system allow for even a semblance of reflective debate? The spectacle of Americans in Israel has provided an entertaining story line for the election, shaped by Finkelstein's reclusiveness and Carville's antics (''Bring me some water and I'll turn it into wine!'' the Louisianian instructs an Israeli waiter). But at what cost?

In the final days of the 1996 campaign, after Finkelstein's polling of the few remaining undecided voters found that the margin for Netanyahu's victory rested on a strong turnout among religious Jewish voters, Likud rolled out one more campaign slogan: ''Netanyahu Is Good for the Jews.'' It was a sophisticated and precisely targeted variation of Netanyahu's security argument, a tribute to Finkelstein's keen ability to construct, in an unusually stratified electorate, a 50-percent-plus-1 margin of victory. It was also -- in the words of an American Republican consultant who admires Finkelstein's skills -- blatantly playing to near-primal tensions among Arabs and Jews, and secular and orthodox Jews, in Israeli society.

The future of Jerusalem is among a host of profoundly serious issues facing the country today. But that would be hard to tell from the campaign. Aware of how Netanyahu marshaled the issue last time -- ''Peres will divide Jerusalem'' -- Barak took the subject off the table virtually before the first campaign poster was printed, pledging never to accept a peace plan that partitioned the city that Israel calls its capital. And Barak's pledge to withdraw troops from Lebanon -- the promise that so annoyed Finklestein -- was notable for its presumably deliberate vagueness. Would he also yield the Golan Heights to Syria? Would he allow the Israelis in the north to be subject to missile attacks from Hezbollah guerrillas who operate along the Lebanon border once Israeli troops quit Lebanon?

In this new kind of campaign, such questions do not count for much. What matters is that Barak has forced Netanyahu to respond to him -- precisely the tactical advantage a campaign consultant seeks out at the start of work each day. ''One of the keys to our success will be taking the initiative, independent of substance,'' Greenberg says. ''Appearing to drive things is very important to establishing the leadership qualities that people seek in an Israeli leader.''

There is a limit, finally, to how much anyone can adopt to a new environment, and Arthur Finkelstein and James Carville are nothing if not creatures of habit. Finkelstein is a man who would happily order the same supper at the same restaurant every night: steak, cooked blue-rare; fried onion rings; an Absolut gimlet. He approaches his campaigns the same way: his American candidates have run identical campaigns for the past 10 years, attacking Democrats for being, variously, liberal, ultraliberal, too liberal, embarrassingly liberal and unbelievably liberal. And he has stuck to this menu despite evidence that its time has passed, as Al D'Amato might attest from his private office in New York. Netanyahu this spring is assailing Barak, not surprisingly, for being too smollani for Israel -- that is, too left for Israel.

For Carville, it's the economy, of course. Barak is talking about jobs and health care, just the way another famous Carville client did back in 1992. ''Right now, my guess is that economic considerations will be a bigger factor in this election than any election before,'' Carville says, an assertion that even some Barak supporters say ignores the reality of what ultimately drives every Israeli election.

No one would suggest that Israel is above the intellectual compromises and ideological shortcuts that are arguably the price for democratic elections. But David Bar-Illan, Netanyahu's director of communications, recalls campaigns framed by ''hourlong lectures in stuffy town-hall meetings, or long harangues to public-square crowds'' involving the major candidates for Prime Minister. ''This almost doesn't happen anymore,'' he continues. ''Now it's sound bites on television.'' While noting that his position in Netanyahu's Government prohibits him from commenting directly on the campaigns at hand, Bar-Illan suggests that sound bites and slogans often ''catch an essential truth, the quintessence of your point,'' but inevitably discourage nuanced discussion. ''If your slogan is, 'My rival will divide Jerusalem,' and it catches on and it stigmatizes your rival, you have achieved your purpose. It's not really a discussion of what should be done with Jerusalem or how am I going to keep it together and how is he going to split it.''

Such tactics obviously work, says Uri Dromi, who was the chief spokesman for the Rabin and Peres Governments. But, he adds, they inevitably worsen the daily struggle to govern a nation ''where the issues are so crucial, where everything is so serious, where everything touches the existence of the country. It is bad for the kind of discourse we have in this country.''

Nevertheless, Israel has crossed a threshold this spring, and it is not likely to abandon the television screen to return to the stuffy meetings and public harangues of a few years ago. ''I think the market for American consultants will expand before it contracts,'' Netanyahu says; it is a future that both he and Barak say they applaud. For now, anyone who finds this observation distressing can console themselves with the thought that one way another, a prominent American consultant will lose an election in Israel next month.

A version of this article appears in print on April 25, 1999, Section 6, Page 42 of the National edition with the headline: Sound Bites Over Jerusalem. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/25/magazine/sound-bites-over-jerusalem.html

2001feb08 NYT Finkelstein | THE SHARON VICTORY: THE HANDLER; American Consultant Makes His Own Comeback in Israel

Adam Nagourney

Feb. 8, 2001 | Section A,Page 16 | nytimes.com

Ariel Sharon was not the only winner in the Israeli election on Tuesday. Arthur J. Finkelstein, the American political consultant whose clients have ranged from Alfonse M. D'Amato in New York to Jesse Helms in North Carolina to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, chalked up a much-needed victory as well, helping to engineer the campaign to drive Ehud Barak out of office and put the Likud Party back in power.

''I see it as the revenge of Finkelstein,'' Mr. Finkelstein said with a laugh yesterday, back in the United States. ''Internally I feel very good about it. I hope the guy does well, and I hope he stays in touch with me.''

The ''guy'' is Mr. Sharon, the Likud Party candidate who Mr. Finkelstein said first contacted him about eight months ago about working, for a third time, in Israel. Mr. Finkelstein's reference to revenge was because he ran Mr. Netanyahu's losing campaign to Mr. Barak in 1999, a race that drew an unusually large amount of attention in the United States because Mr. Finkelstein's counterparts on Mr. Barak's campaign included James Carville, Bob Shrum and Stanley Greenberg, three of the nation's top Democratic consultants.

Mr. Shrum and Mr. Greenberg were back in Israel again this year, working for Mr. Barak.

Mr. Netanyahu's defeat came when Mr. Finkelstein -- who had been behind a series of aggressive and successful Republican Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns in the 1980's and 1990's -- had been associated with a series of losing races in the United States, including Mr. D'Amato's 10-point loss to Charles E. Schumer in the 1998 Senate race.

Mr. Finkelstein constructed a notably different appeal for Mr. Sharon than he did in either of the campaigns he oversaw for Mr. Netanyahu, a reflection of the different nature of these two Likud candidates and the extent to which political times have changed in Israel.

In 1996 and 1999, Mr. Finkelstein orchestrated fairly belligerent campaigns, presenting Mr. Netanyahu as the candidate that would assure security in Israel and guard against the division of Jerusalem.

In one particularly memorable advertisement from 1996, Mr. Finkelstein showed an image of the aftermath of the terrorist bombing of the No. 18 bus in Jerusalem, as an announcer said in Hebrew: ''No security. No peace. No reason to vote for Peres.''

This time, though, with a candidate who was a general and who did not need to prove his commitment to Israeli security, Mr. Finkelstein took a softer approach, producing, most notably, an advertisement that showed Mr. Sharon playing on his farm with his grandchildren.

''Barak promised them security and promised them strength and gave them weakness,'' Mr. Finkelstein said in an interview yesterday. ''And Sharon, by definition of who he was, provided them security. What he needed to do was show that peace could be accomplished through security.''

''Thematically, the job was to show Sharon was more than secure,'' he said. The advertisement on the farm was intended to show that ''this was in fact a very centered human being, with roots to the soil, roots to the country, roots to the family.''

And with Mr. Barak in such trouble in the opinion polls -- even Mr. Finkelstein acknowledged that it would have been hard for a Likud candidate to lose this race -- Mr. Sharon kept a relatively low profile, in effect letting Mr. Barak run against himself.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 8, 2001, Section A, Page 16 of the National edition with the headline: THE SHARON VICTORY: THE HANDLER; American Consultant Makes His Own Comeback in Israel. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

New York Times | Opinion | The Gay G.O.P. | by Frank Rich | 28 Sept 1996

Frank Rich | nytimes.com  |Sept. 28, 1996

September 28, 1996, Section 1,Page 23

Anyone who can't picture a same-sex marriage should turn to the new issue of Boston Magazine, which tells the happy story of two men who live together openly in the horsy suburb of Ipswich, where they raise two children in domestic peace, without frightening either the neighbors or the horses. The tale is told in a profile of the couple's famous half: Arthur J. Finkelstein, the legendary G.O.P. political consultant best known to New Yorkers for masterminding the campaigns of Al D'Amato and, most recently, Benjamin Netanyahu.

There is, however, a troubling side to this story, written by Stephen Rodrick. In addition to Mr. D'Amato, who supports gay rights, Mr. Finkelstein has also helped elect, at considerable financial enrichment to himself, some of the most powerful gay-bashing politicians in America.

When the Senate voted 97 to 3 last year on the Ryan White bill for AIDS funding, two of the three no votes came from Finkelstein-aided Senators: North Carolina's Jesse Helms and New Hampshire's Bob Smith. When the Senate voted for a Defense of Marriage Act and against a gay anti-discrimination bill this month, two other Finkelstein Senators, Oklahoma's Don Nickles and North Carolina's Lauch Faircloth, led the anti-gay forces on the floor, with Mr. Faircloth flatly declaring that ''same-sex unions do not make strong families.'' (Has he met Mr. Finkelstein's kids?)

HYPOCRISY

The hypocrisy here stinks as much as that emanating from the Dick Morris affair. Maybe more. You decide which is worse -- a consultant with a sleazy personal life who orchestrates President Clinton's campaign on ''family values'' or a consultant with an apparently exemplary family life like Mr. Finkelstein, who has promoted a bigot of the magnitude of Mr. Helms?

Mr. Finkelstein, who told The New York Post ''all my friends and family know I'm gay,'' declined to elaborate on why he sells his talents to lawmakers who would outlaw his family's very existence. But he is, in any case, only the latest example of this brand of hypocrisy on the right. From J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn to Terry Dolan, who ran the Reagan-era National Conservative Political Action Committee, some of the most ruthless exploiters of homophobia in public life have turned out to be homosexual themselves. Even Pat Robertson has employed a gay speechwriter, the Rev. Mel White (who jumped ship to become a decidedly unhypocritical and eloquent champion of gay rights).

In some cases, such as Mr. Finkelstein's, the gay facilitators of gay-bashing don't hide their homosexuality -- which raises a parallel issue of hypocrisy about their heterosexual associates. Why do so many straight conservative Republican politicians take the low road of preaching against homosexuality in public when they practice tolerance in private?

Bruce Bawer, the gay author who collaborated with the openly gay (and about-to-retire) G.O.P. Representative Steve Gunderson on his recent memoir, describes what he calls ''a gentlemen's agreement'' among Washington conservatives: '

'They say 'We'll socialize with you and your significant other and we'll all be charming, as long as you don't mention it in public, and we get to say anything we want in public.' That's the deal. What gets in my craw is that they're exploiting ugly attitudes rather than helping to change them -- which they are in a position to do.''

The gay Log Cabin Republicans' spokesman, David Greer, paints the same picture and holds closeted gay Republicans most responsible for it: 

''I have always believed that if everyone who is gay in the party, from interns to chiefs of staff to the candidates themselves, were to come out, this wouldn't be the anti-gay party.'' 

Maybe so, but meanwhile the gentlemen's agreement of silence holds.

''Hypocrisy kills,'' wrote the journalist Ellen Hume back in 1988, speaking literally about the case of Terry Dolan -- an AIDS casualty who might be living today had he used his clout to persuade the Reagan Administration to battle the epidemic rather than retreat into silence. At the very least, as the G.O.P. consultant Tanya Melich put it this week, Republican hypocrisy about homosexuality ''poisons politics.'' 

For proof, one need look no further than the shameless election-year spectacle of candidates demagoguing against same-sex marriage, even when they are political bedfellows of the very Americans they ask the rest of us to deplore.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 28, 1996, Section 1, Page 23 of the National edition with the headline: The Gay G.O.P.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/28/opinion/the-gay-gop.html

2022sep27 Finkelstein Archives ANALYSIS: Secretive Arthur Finkelstein, secret no more

Gay GOP consultant pioneered slash-and-burn campaign tactics of ‘80s

September 27, 2022 By Charles Francis  | WashingtonBlade

As Archive Activists, we eagerly awaited this year’s opening of Republican campaign consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein’s papers at the Library of Congress. Donated by Finkelstein’s husband, evidently to cement the man’s political legacy, the Finkelstein papers are loaded with the ideas and words of his candidates who attacked homosexuals to court the voters who fear them. Finkelstein pioneered the slash-and-burn campaigns of the 1980s, working for clients including Sens. Jesse Helms (N.C.), Bob Smith (N.H.), Don Nickles (Okla.), and Lauch Faircloth (N.C.) — senators who formed the core opposition to gay and lesbian-related legislation in the day. We recall when Sen. Nickles, in 1998 the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, declared Ambassador James Hormel unqualified to be named an ambassador because anyone who promotes “immoral behavior” should not represent the U.S.

GREEDY GAY FINKELSTEIN? GOT THE NAZI GOLD

Political commentary on Arthur Finkelstein is most always “de-gayed,” his homosexuality a footnote. When I ask people how Finkelstein could live with such dissonance — being gay with a husband, raising children and working for Helms, Smith, Nickles and Faircloth — one response rang most true: 

“Did you ever see his palatial estate?” It was not all about “compartmentalization” or “self-loathing,” just greed is good for Citizen Finkelstein?

“Arthur J. Finkelstein, Advising Leaders Around the World,” one flier proclaims. “It is said that no American political consultant has been involved in as many successful Senate races as AJF,” the promotional piece says about this secretive man who lived in a Tudor mansion at the end of a quarter-mile drive through a horse farm. 

GETTING OUTED IN 1996

“In the fall, visitors park their Bentleys and Rollses in the pasture. Dressed like plump extras in a Merchant-Ivory film gone wrong, they’re here for the annual fox hunt,” wrote Stephen Rodrick in a lacerating Boston Magazine profile that famously outed Finkelstein in 1996. “In the amoral world of big league politics … Finkelstein has worked for the chief gay-bashers on Capitol Hill while raising two children with his male live-in partner,” says the magazine’s press release. His archive, organized into 139 boxes, covers it all.

Through the anger of scrawled notes never released, Finkelstein expresses outrage at having to publicly reconcile his politics with his life. “This (Boston Magazine article) is a political hatchet job. It’s about destroying me politically. They are not after me for being gay,” he writes. “That we are gay is obvious — but they use it as a weapon meant to unleash the prejudices and hatreds that can bring me down … my strongest personal values are Liberterian [sic].” Jesse Helms, Don Nickles libertarians? He rails against the same “prejudices and hatreds” he helped his candidates unleash in scores of elections.

You can see in the archive his confusion at being confronted on the subject of “who really is this reclusive Arthur Finkelstein?” There are the handwritten scratch-outs on legal pads:

FUSSY GAY IDENTITY CRISIS

 “I NEVER CHOSE TO BE A PUBLIC PERSON. I BELIEVED, AND STILL DO, THAT I HAVE A RIGHT TO MY PRIVATE LIFE.” Scratched out, “I am a libertarian conservative….I have never seen Eye-to-Eye with my candidate on all the issues!”

He wrote, then scribbled over,

“I thought, at least I hoped, we were past the point of persecuting people for their lifestyle.”

Did Finkelstein see eye-to-eye with client Jesse Helms’ direct mail?

“Do you resent—as I do—the corrupting of the word “gay”? These people are NOT “gays”— they are HOMOSEXUALS. Will you help me counter these latest attacks coming from the homosexuals,” Helms asks.

FEARMONGERING

In the archive is a memo to Finkelstein from Tom Ellis, described as the “architect of Senator Helms’ rise to political power.” “People vote on fears. The AIDS [sic] offers a fear … Can we show that the Haitians who are in the group that has AIDS were part of the mixture of people that now come into the United States from Cuba? I feel like I have seen some statistics that Castro shipped in a large number of homosexuals.” People vote their fears.

In another note, Finkelstein vents, “I am a Milton Friedman Republican who believes in Lassize [sic]-faire government and not every gay person must be a Democrat or PERISH.”

Milton Friedman’s bestseller “Free to Choose” was not about fears, but choice. To be fair, the archive documents reveal Finkelstein’s close working relationship with New York Sen. Alfonse D’Amato who was “one of the strongest Republican voice (sic) of gays in the Military,” he writes in his own defense.

ELECTING JEW-HATERS AND GAY-BASHERS

Finkelstein never “perished.” He went into international consulting for clients including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his party Fidesz that viciously targets LGBTQ citizens. Working with Orban for five years, Finkelstein also helped invent the now infamous anti-Semitic “enemy of the people” George Soros. Speaking this year in Dallas to the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC), Orban attacked Soros (“The globalists can all go to hell!”) and threatened LGBTQ citizens worldwide, “Leave our children alone,” he yelled. From Helms to Orban, this is the Finkelstein legacy.

The influence remains. There is this birthday note in 2000 to Roger Stone, then a Trump lobbyist:

“Dear Roger, Have a happy next 1,000 years, and may Donald Trump be President for 900 of them. Best, Arthur J. Finkelstein.”

The author is president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.

From <https://www.washingtonblade.com/2022/09/27/analysis-secretive-arthur-finkelstein-secret-no-more/>

Obit 2017: Tablet, Finkelstein  |  ‘Bibi’s Brain,’ Arthur Finkelstein, Dead at 72

Known in Israel as “Doctor Fear,” the political strategist gave the prime minister his 1996 upset victory

By Liel Leibovitz | August 21, 2017 | TabletMag.com

The most influential writer in Israel’s history, arguably, isn’t Amos Oz or David Grossman or A.B. Yehoshua—it’s Arthur Finkelstein. The political strategist, who died this weekend at 72, was the author of a four-word campaign sloganthat delivered Benjamin Netanyahu his 1996 victory and changed Israeli politics and culture forever.

To understand his impact, you’d need to consider how hopeless Netanyahu’s prospects looked just a few months before his electoral ascendance. He took over the Likud in 1993, and whereas Labor—presided over by the second coming of Yitzhak Rabin and aglow with the promise of making peace with the Palestinians—was seen as exciting and dynamic, Likud was perceived as a retirement home for political has-beens, washed-up old-timers like David Levy and Ariel Sharon. Bibi eked out a victory in the party’s primaries, tarnished by a television appearance in which he claimed that he was being blackmailed by an unnamed competitor—most likely Levy himself—who claimed to have a sex tape of Netanyahu and a woman who wasn’t his wife. As Rabin launched the Oslo Accords, Bibi presided over shouty rallies that called the peace process a disaster. And when Rabin was assassinated, in November of 1995, the election of his immediate successor, Shimon Peres, seemed all but certain.

Peres believed it, too, which is why he decided to move up the election. Coming less than eight months after Rabin’s death, he believed, it was impossible for Israelis to vote for anyone but Rabin’s right-hand man in peacemaking.

Enter Arthur Finkelstein, stage right.Born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents—his father, Morris, drove a yellow cab—he got his start in politics in Queens College, where he helped Ayn Rand on a radio show and developed the ideological convictions that would guide him his entire life. He volunteered for Barry Goldwater’s doomed campaign in 1964, worked on Reagan’s unsuccessful bid in 1976, and, by 1980, had learned from his mistakes.

“The most overwhelming fact of politics is what people do not know,” he told college students in a rare 2011 public appearance in Prague. “In politics, it’s what you perceive to be true that’s true, not truth. If I tell you one thing is true, you will believe the second thing is true. A good politician will tell you a few things that are true before he will tell you a few things that are untrue, because you will then believe all the things he has said, true and untrue.”

And it was there, in the dusk between truth and untruth, that political brilliance lay: Finkelstein called his strategy “rejectionist voting,” and he set out to prove it on Jacob K. Javits. In 1979, the celebrated Republican was diagnosed with ALS, which led to a challenge from a relatively obscure Long Island Republican named Alfonse D’Amato. Working for D’Amato, Finkelstein ruthlessly portrayed Javits as too old and too sick, not only literally but metaphorically as well—it was time for a more robust, more right-wing Republican. D’Amato won, a surprise that shocked many; Finkelstein had perfected his method.

He’d worked with many Republican candidates throughout his career—Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Orrin Hatch are just a few—and helped make the word “liberal” a liability. By the time he was recruited by Netanyahu, he’d perfected his methodology.

It included highly complex polling and data analysis, but its beating heart was always the ability to deliver a few devastating lines that portrayed his political opponents in the worst imaginable light. Running against Peres, reality handed him an assist: The first few months of 1996 were marked by repeated Palestinian suicide bombings, killing scores of Israelis and making security the top campaign issue.

Finkelstein needed just a few words to capture what many Israelis were feeling: Accompanied by gruesome images of burning buses and wounded victims in the aftermath of the latest terrorist attacks, an ad for Netanyahu delivered the following slogan—“there’s no peace, there’s no security, there’s no reason to vote for Peres.”

It caught on, but Finkelstein wasn’t done. Accusing Peres of being an incompetent leader was a rational argument; those never won elections. What he needed was a knock-out punch, something that convinced Israelis that Peres wasn’t just inept but insidious. By all accounts a warm and jovial man in real-life—he would remove his shoes immediately upon entering a meeting, and march around in his sox, smiling and telling jokes and anecdotes—Finkelstein paced about in Netanyahu’s office until he heard someone toss around an idea he liked. It was a four-word epic: “Peres Will Divide Jerusalem.”

And with that, Labor’s long-time politician, a former aid to Ben-Gurion, a veteran Zionist with many accomplishments, was turned into a traitor to his people who would surrender sovereignty over Judaism’s holiest city. It worked: With the narrowest of margins, less than 30,000 votes, Netanyahu won.

After that, Israelis, those who had voted for Bibi and those who couldn’t believe he was their new prime minister, were united in their admiration for Finkelstein. Schoolchildren who could barely name the ministers in the cabinet knew his name, and reporters often referred to him as “Doctor Fear,” a Strangelove on the Mediterranean. He’d advised other Israeli politicians since, and had his share of defeats, but those did nothing to dim his glow. He’ll always be the man who gave rise to Bibi, the once and current prime minister whose politics and personality are synonymous, in so many ways, with Israel’s.

Finkelstein is survived by his husband, two daughters, a granddaughter, and two brothers.

“I would always say, ‘Arthur, do you realizes how much we’re changing history?’ ” his colleague George Birnbaum told The New York Times. “He would say, ‘I don’t know how much we’re changing history; we’re touching history.’”

From < https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/bibs-brain-arthur-finkelstein-dead-at-72>

2005apr12 NYT Finkelstein | Clinton Says Gay Opponent of His Wife May Be 'Self-Loathing'

Raymond Hernandez | nytimes.com  | April 12, 2005

Former President Bill Clinton unleashed an attack yesterday against a gay Republican strategist who has plans to work against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's re-election, suggesting that the man may be "self-loathing" to work on behalf of the Republican Party.

The former president was reacting to reports that the strategist, Arthur J. Finkelstein, was in the midst of setting up a political action committee to defeat Mrs. Clinton in 2006. Republican officials close to Mr. Finkelstein have said that he hopes to be able to finance an advertising campaign similar to the one orchestrated against John Kerry last year by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

"I was sort of sad when I read it," Mr. Clinton said, speaking at a news conference at his office in Harlem, where he announced that his foundation was donating $10 million to treat children with AIDS.

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The former president noted that an earlier article over the weekend reported that Mr. Finkelstein had married his male partner in a civil ceremony at his home in Massachusetts, then he alluded to the Republican Party's use of the same-sex marriage issue to mobilize conservative voters.

"Either this guy believes his party is not serious and he's totally Machiavellian," Mr. Clinton said, or "he may be blinded by self-loathing." Mr. Finkelstein, a reclusive former adviser to Gov. George E. Pataki, did not respond to a message left at his office seeking a comment on Mr. Clinton's remarks. But his allies quickly did.

"It's really beneath a former president to comment on someone's personal life like that," said Michael McKeon, a Republican strategist, former Pataki aide and friend of Mr. Finkelstein's. "After everything he has been through in his own life, you'd think he'd know better."

The spectacle of the former president coming to the defense of his wife, a tough politician in her own right, generated considerable buzz in political circles, particularly since Mr. Clinton has tried to keep a low profile and stay out of Mrs. Clinton's way since she took office.

While Mrs. Clinton's popularity rating is high and Republicans are having trouble finding a strong candidate to run against her, the senator's political advisers have seized on Mr. Finkelstein's plans as a strong sign of the fierce campaign they expect from Republicans.

Mr. Finkelstein, who helped engineer Mr. Pataki's 1994 victory over Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, has not publicly commented on his plans to establish an anti-Clinton committee.

But the Republicans familiar with those plans say he is attempting to line up donors to help the committee, called Stop Her Now, reach its goal of raising as much as $10 million to finance an independent campaign against her. In that context, Mr. Clinton offered high praise for his wife's record in office, describing her as a hard-working senator. "I don't think he'll stop her," he said, referring to Mr. Finkelstein.

Mr. Finkelstein's associates have said they were surprised to learn of his marriage to another man, in light of his history with the party and his own place as a prominent conservative. He has been allied over the years with Republicans who have adamantly opposed gay rights measures, including former Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Mr. Finkelstein has been the subject of attacks by gay rights advocates who have accused him of hypocrisy.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting for this article.

A version of this article appears in print on April 12, 2005, Section B, Page 3 of the National edition with the headline: Clinton Attacks Gay G.O.P. Strategist Opposing His Wife as Possibly 'Self-Loathing'. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/clinton-says-gay-opponent-of-his-wife-may-be-selfloathing.html

2005apr10 NYT Finkelstein | In Attempt to Oust Clinton, a Strategist's Comeback Bid

Raymond Hernandez | NewYorkTimes | April 10, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 9 - Arthur J. Finkelstein, the political guru who helped engineer the defeat of one Democratic luminary, Mario M. Cuomo, has his sights set on another: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Finkelstein, a longtime adviser to Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, is setting up a political action committee to mount a campaign offensive against Mrs. Clinton in 2006, when she is up for re-election, according to Republicans familiar with his plans.

Mr. Finkelstein, who is known to be reclusive, would not comment for this article. But Republicans who know of his intentions say he is moving behind the scenes to line up donors to help the committee, called Stop Her Now, reach its goal of raising as much as $10 million to finance an independent campaign against her.

His plan includes financing an advertising assault against her similar to the one orchestrated by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that attacked Senator John Kerry's Vietnam service during the presidential election, according to the Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Many details are sketchy, including whether Mr. Finkelstein has the start-up money and staff necessary to get the project off the ground. But Republicans close to Mr. Finkelstein said the negative feeling that Mrs. Clinton arouses among Republicans would make it relatively easy to raise money.

"There's a very good argument to be made that you could fund this committee through direct-mail appeals and through the Internet, just because she is so strongly disliked, particularly by activist Republicans," said one Republican official.

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Stop Her Now is among the newest of the so-called 527 advocacy groups that have been springing up since last year's campaign season. These partisan groups, known as 527's because of the tax code that governs them, have helped Democrats and Republicans raise enormous sums of money and energize their political bases.

The groups began playing a prominent role last year after new campaign finance laws prohibited major donors, unions and corporations from giving unlimited amounts of money to parties. Those donors, in turn, began pumping money into the coffers of 527's instead.

The preparations against Mrs. Clinton come at a time when she appears to be riding high in New York, with her popularity rating soaring and state Republicans having a difficult time recruiting a top-tier candidate to run against her.

But Mrs. Clinton's advisers say they are prepared for a hard election season, predicting that Republicans from across the country will mobilize to stop her in New York. Indeed, Republicans are warning that Mrs. Clinton will be in a position to run for president in 2008 if she is not defeated in New York next year.

Mrs. Clinton's political advisers have seized on the news of Mr. Finkelstein's plans to rally their own troops. In a fund-raising e-mail message sent out this month, Mrs. Clinton's campaign cited the plans as evidence that the senator will become the prime target of "the right-wing attack machine."

Political strategists in both parties say that Stop Her Now represents a chance at political redemption for Mr. Finkelstein, who not only helped engineer Mr. Pataki's 1994 victory over Mr. Cuomo but also gained notoriety with his strategy of turning the word "liberal" into a liability for Democrats in national races he directed in the 1990's.

Mr. Finkelstein's personal life made headlines Saturday after he said he had married his longtime male partner in a civil ceremony in Massachusetts, a move that startled some of his associates, given his history with the Republican Party.

As a political consultant, his standing has been diminished after suffering a string of defeats during high-profile United States Senate races around the country, including New York, North Carolina and Florida.

One of his most significant losses came in 1998, with the defeat of Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato of New York, Mr. Finkelstein's chief political patron in the 1990's. During the 1996 election cycle, Mr. D'Amato, who was then chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, had made Mr. Finkelstein the committee's chief strategist and pollster.

Recently, Mr. Finkelstein suffered another major blow when Mr. Pataki picked a new state party chairman, Stephen Minarik, who then, with the governor's support, terminated a contract the party had with Mr. Finkelstein and his associate, Kieran Mahoney.

Mr. Finkelstein and Mr. Mahoney, who have been among Mr. Pataki's closest advisers for more than a decade, were among the chief architects of his victory over Mr. Cuomo in 1994.

And Mr. Finkelstein drew criticism within national Republican circles when he said that Republican efforts to court evangelical Christians could hurt the party.

Mr. Finkelstein has apparently been planning the anti-Clinton committee for months now. But political strategists in both parties are questioning how successful this project will be, partly because he has been so secretive about where he is getting the start-up money he needs.

"I believe he is very serious about this," said one Republican official. "But the only way this becomes real is if he gets money behind it. He doesn't have the wherewithal financially to start this up on his own."

But Republicans familiar with the project said that Mr. Finkelstein is just weeks away from publicly launching the committee, having established a Web site and put a direct-mail operation in place.

Republican officials say Mr. Finkelstein is hoping to model his committee after the National Conservative Political Action Committee, a group he helped lead in the early 1980's in its campaign to, among other things, unseat liberal senators.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2005, Section 1, Page 35 of the National edition with the headline: In Attempt to Oust Clinton, A Strategist's Comeback Bid. Order Reprints | Today’s

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/nyregion/in-attempt-to-oust-clinton-a-strategists-comeback-bid.html

2003jul30 Roll Call | Finkelstein’s Protégés Are His Best Revenge

ByChris Cillizza roll Call

Posted July 30, 2003

Derided by many in the political establishment as an odd and increasingly ineffective strategist, Republican consultant Arthur Finkelstein is gaining a measure of revenge against his critics.

Even as Finkelstein plays a less and less prominent role in campaigns, his acolytes have established themselves as some of the nation’s leading political practitioners.

RICK REED

“Arthur has always been the anti-establishment consultant,” said media consultant Rick Reed, who worked under Finkelstein in the early 1980s. “He’s not one to spend a lot of time trying to curry favor with the party hierarchy, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.”

 Tony Fabrizi

Kieran Mahoney

Alex Castellanos

Aside from Reed, who is a partner in Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, John and Jim McLaughlin of McLaughlin and Associates, Tony Fabrizio of Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, Kieran Mahoney, and Alex Castellanos of National Media are also part of the new generation of Finkelstein-trained consultants.

All told, these individuals have helped elect — or re-elect — 11 Senators since 1998, a roster that includes Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) as well as current National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman George Allen (Va.). They have all done work for the House and Senate campaign committees; John McLaughlin is the de facto in-house pollster of the NRSC.

JON LERNER

Jon Lerner, a Finkelstein protege and relatively recent entrant into the political consulting world, found success in the past cycle with the election of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Lerner also does work for the Club for Growth.

“Everybody that has gone through his shop has come out the other end and been a player,” said Mahoney. “The common denominator is that Arthur is a great teacher.”

• Recording Industry Association of America Chairman Mitch Bainwol,

• DCI Group’s Jim Murphy

• Roger stone

A number of others involved in Washington’s political industry, including Recording Industry Association of America Chairman Mitch Bainwol, DCI Group’s Jim Murphy and controversial on-again, off-again consultant Roger Stone, have strong connections to Finkelstein as well.

And, to a man, Finkelstein’s protégés speak highly of the consultant after whom many of them have modeled their careers.

“Arthur Finkelstein is the Roger Clemens of political consulting,” Lerner said. “When he retires everyone knows he’s going to the Hall of Fame, but before he retires he still has a lot of good games left in him.”

“I wouldn’t be doing what it is I do if it wasn’t for him,” Fabrizio said.

Neil Newhouse, a partner in the GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies and a sometime rival to Finkelstein, noted that Finkelstein himself has largely disappeared from the arena of campaign politics over the past decade, but many of his former associates have picked up his mantle.

“The first 15 years his mark on politics was the people he elected and the style of campaigns,” Newhouse said. “The second 15 has been about his disciples.”

FINKELSTEIN MEDIA SHY

• Finkelstein has long been an enigmatic personality in the consulting world, the most unknowable figure in an industry populated with quirky individuals.

• He shuns nearly all media inquiries, is known for his distaste for neckties, frequently discards his shoes during business meetings and works diligently not to be photographed. He did not return multiple calls for comment on this story.

• As a result of his personal style and slash-and-burn approach to campaigns, Finkelstein has never been a darling of the political class in Washington and has as many detractors among his colleagues as he has advocates.

NRSC D'Amato campaign

Finkelstein briefly assumed a prominent role in the National Republican Senatorial Committee when then-Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.), a longtime associate of the pollster, headed the committee during the 1996 election cycle. Finkelstein handled the consulting for six of the competitive races that cycle.

D’Amato said Finkelstein was “way ahead of his time,” adding: “It is unfortunate that his talents are not called upon more.”

The presence of Finkelstein-trained consultants, however, ensures that his philosophy, centered on the compartmentalization of GOP voting groups, will continue to influence the way campaigns are run.

“He has taken the most dispassionate, comprehensive analysis of how the American electorate works and why of anyone I know,” Mahoney said.

D’Amato noted that while most professional political pollsters can produce an accurate set of numbers, Finkelstein distinguishes himself with his “capacity to pick up on the subtleties and nuances.”

INDUSTRY CRITICS

• Many of Finkelstein’s opponents respond that he has relied too heavily on his trademark “too liberal” tag line regardless of the circumstances in a campaign.

• “The guy looks at elections as though it’s still the 1980s, and his strategy is always the same,” said one GOP political consultant. “Democrats know exactly what’s coming, so it’s easy for them to handle it.”

• On more tangible ground, Finkelstein’s approach to campaigns has focused on identifying and turning out the most conservative voters and an aggressive — even brash — approach to the back and forth of a campaign.

• “On a practical level, he taught a lot of people about ‘wing’ candidacies and how the conservative activists on the Republican side were the ones who controlled the nominating process,” Reed said.

• Finkelstein has helped steer a number of prominent Senate conservatives through tough races, including Sen. Don Nickles’ (R-Okla.) first victory in 1980 and his 1986 re-election, then-Sen. Jesse Helms’ (R-N.C.) 1984 race against then-Gov. Jim Hunt (D), and former Sen. Bob Smith’s (N.H.) 1990 and 1996 races.

• Finkelstein is perhaps best known for his work on behalf of D’Amato starting with his 1980 primary defeat of liberal Sen. Jacob Javits (R) and ending in his 1998 loss to now-Sen. Charles Schumer (D).

SCHUMER & lOSSES

When asked about Finkelstein, Schumer said the two had never met, although “he has made a lot of films about me.” As to the harshly negative nature of the campaign that saw the two men spend better than $40 million,

Schumer said: “[Finkelstein] has the reputation of being hard hitting, but we hit pretty hard in that campaign too.”

Although D’Amato does not blame Finkelstein for his 1998 defeat, that race, coupled with the losses of Sens. Lauch Faircloth (although Finkelstein joined the North Carolina race in the closing frames after the incumbent had fallen behind Democrat John Edwards) and the subsequent defeats of Bill Roth (Del.) and then-Rep. Bill McCollum in a Florida open Senate seat race have diminished his standing among the political class.

Even some of those who consider themselves Finkelstein’s allies, however, admit that he has undergone a diminution of his standing in Washington as a result of the string of defeats and the retirements or deaths of several former allies.

The departures of Helms, Thurmond, Faircloth and Smith, as well as former Sens. Connie Mack (Fla.) and Larry Pressler (S.D.), have limited the number of Members with direct connections and affection for Finkelstein’s work, several GOP sources said.

In the previous cycle, Finkelstein had only two stateside clients — Pataki and Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Both won their races.\

ARIEL SHARON CONSULTANT

Finkelstein also worked with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he won a second term in late January; he had previously served as a consultant to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Several of his former associates quickly sought to explain the reasons behind Finkelstein’s shrinking client list.

They noted that as a general consultant in a world filled with specialized practitioners, Finkelstein spends much more time with each candidate than his competitors, which limits the number of candidates he can take on.

SHRINKING FINKELSTEIN PRESENCE, BUT BUSY DECIPLES

“Because of the way he operates, as a one-man gang, he has never been like POS, which has 20 big races in a cycle,” said Lerner.

Another reason for Finkelstein’s smaller client list is the increasing number of consultants, all aiming for the business of the same pool of candidates, argued Mahoney.

“Part of Arthur’s problem is that he has trained a bunch of guys like me who now go out and pitch races against him,” Mahoney said.

“Arthur is at the point in his life where he does the races he wants to do,” added Fabrizio. “You get old enough that you don’t care about running to Utah to meet with a Congressional candidate.”

CQ Roll Call is a part of FiscalNote, the leading technology innovator at the intersection of global business and government. Copyright 2023 CQ Roll Call. All rights reserved.

From <https://rollcall.com/2003/07/30/finkelsteins-proteges-are-his-best-revenge/>

1993 FEC COMPLAINT FILED AGAINST NRSC - ILLEGAL SOFT MONEY [1993] #finkelstein

…and now Citizens United has opened flood gates

https://www.fec.gov/files/legal/murs/3774/0000295B.pdf

the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ("DSCC") files this complaint seeking an immediate investigation by the Federal Election Commission into the illegal spending practices of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (WRSCIt). As the public record shows, and an investigation will confirm, the NRSC and a series of ostensibly nonprofit,

nonpartisan groups have undertaken a significant and sustained effort to funnel "soft money101 into federal elections in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended or "the Act"), 2 U.S.C. 5s 431 et seq., and the Federal Election Commission (peFECt)Regulations, 11 C.F.R. 85 100.1 & sea

#NEXTDOC====================

OBIT: NYT 2017 Finkelstein | Arthur Finkelstein, Innovative, Influential Conservative Strategist, Dies at 72

IMAGE: Arthur Finkelstein, right, in 1983 at the Yale Club in Manhattan with Paul Curran, left, a one-time Republican candidate for governor of New York, and Whitney North Seymour, the former United States attorney for the Southern District.Credit...Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

By Sam Roberts | Aug. 19, 2017 | NewYorkTimes

Arthur Finkelstein, a reclusive political Svengali who revolutionized campaign polling and financing and helped elect a bevy of conservative candidates, including President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, died on Friday night in Ipswich, Mass., where he lived. He was 72.

His family confirmed the death in a statement. The cause was lung cancer.

Mr. Finkelstein was among the first political strategists in the late 1970s to grasp the potential of a United States Supreme Court ruling that allowed putatively independent political committees to spend money on behalf of individual candidates and causes.

The decision led to a proliferation of fund-raising vehicles that were supposed to be beyond the control of candidates or party officials but that in fact often worked in concert with their campaigns. One such group, the muscular National Conservative Political Action Committee, was established with Mr. Finkelstein’s help.

He also pioneered sophisticated demographic analyses of primary voters and methodical exit polling, and of using a marketing strategy, called microtargeting, to identify specific groups of potential supporters of a candidate regardless of their party affiliation.

He would bombard them with appeals to support a candidate through direct mail and phone calls, coupled with television advertisements that mercilessly exploited a rival’s vulnerabilities

“The numbers spoke to him,” Kieran Mahoney, his frequent campaign collaborator and one of his many protégés, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Finkelstein’s combative campaigns helped elect or re-elect the Republican Senators James L. Buckley and Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York, Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Connie Mack III of Florida, Don Nickles of Oklahoma and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

“Arthur was responsible for electing more people to the United States Senate than any other political consultant,” Mr. D’Amato said in an interview.

In the process, Mr. Finkelstein transformed liberal into a dirty word.

His conservative political action committee was instrumental in the surprise unseatings of liberal Democratic stalwarts in 1980, including Senators Birch Bayh of Indiana, Frank Church of Idaho and George S. McGovern of South Dakota. He also collaborated with fellow Republicans in establishing another fund-raising behemoth, the National Congressional Club

In 1994, Mr. D’Amato and Mr. Finkelstein engineered the defeat of Mario M. Cuomo, New York’s three-term governor, by George E. Pataki, an obscure state senator. Mr. Pataki’s resonant rationale was that Mr. Cuomo was “too liberal for too long.”

A canny Brooklyn-born brawler who made his political debut on a Greenwich Village soapbox, Mr. Finkelstein was adept at aggressively wooing disaffected Democrats to his Republican clients’ camps in statewide campaigns. His strategy was largely to ignore party labels and focus on the basic beliefs that moved these Democrats.

“I have been criticized for 20 years for running ideologically arched campaigns,” he told the National Conservative Political Action Conference in 1991. “I plead guilty. I will continue to run ideologically arched campaigns as long as there are more conservatives than there are liberals, rather than more Democrats than there are Republicans.”

He refused to acknowledge, though, that he engaged in negative campaigning. That phrase connotes false accusations, he said, when “it just means that you speak about the failings of your opponent as opposed to the virtues of your candidate.”

Rather, he called his strategy “rejectionist voting” — a formula built on slogans that disparaged adversaries. (He would often count on a third contender to siphon votes from the rival who posed the most serious threat to a client).

Prime examples of that strategy were Mr. D’Amato’s upset win over Senator Jacob K. Javits, the venerable liberal Republican incumbent, in the 1980 primary, and Mr. D’Amato’s re-election squeaker against the Democratic state attorney general, Robert Abrams (“hopelessly liberal,” Mr. D’Amato said), in 1992, when Bill Clinton swept the state with a 1.2-million-vote margin on his way to winning the presidency.

“I never once put him on television to talk,” Mr. Finkelstein said of Mr. D’Amato. “He was completely irrelevant to the campaigns.”

Those campaigns were “vicious and mean,” he told a college audience in Prague in 2011. “Negative, negative, negative — ′cause you can’t possibly win otherwise.”

The negatives used in the primary — portraying Mr. Javits, at 76, as sick and aging — were tempered in the 1980 general election campaign by an ad that famously featured Mr. D’Amato’s mother, armed with bags of groceries, lamenting the struggles of the middle class and urging, “Vote for my son, Al.”

“That humanized me,” Mr. D’Amato recalled.

Mr. Finkelstein said, “We had to prove Alfonse had a mother.”

Mr. D’Amato narrowly defeated his Democratic rival, Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, in the general election, in which Mr. Javits ran on the Liberal line.

As a gay, Jewish libertarian, Mr. Finkelstein helped elect homophobic candidates, once polled South Carolinians on whether they would support a rival candidate identified as a Jewish immigrant, and supported gay rights and abortion rights as what the political consultant Roger Stone, another of his protégés, called, in a phone interview, “a situational conservative.”

IMAGE: Mr. Finkelstein, left, and his husband, Donald Curiale, in 2013 at an event in which Mr. Finkelstein was given an award by the American Association of Political Consultants.Credit...Gary Maloney

Still, Mr. Finkelstein suggested, he was not a hired gun who would provide his services to just anyone.

“It would be very hard for me to work with somebody with whom I have fundamental disagreements, against someone with whom I agree,” he said.

Mr. Finkelstein insisted that he never lied — “I do not slander somebody without proof,” was how he put it — but he acknowledged a generation ago that truth was fungible.

“The most overwhelming fact of politics is what people do not know,” he told the college students in Prague. “In politics, it’s what you perceive to be true that’s true, not truth. If I tell you one thing is true, you will believe the second thing is true. A good politician will tell you a few things that are true before he will tell you a few things that are untrue, because you will then believe all the things he has said, true and untrue.”

Arthur Jay Finkelstein was born on May 18, 1945, in the East New York section of Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Morris, was a cabby. His mother was the former Zella Ordanksi. The family moved to Levittown, on Long Island, when he was 11, then to Queens, where he graduated from Forest Hills High School.

In 1967, Mr. Finkelstein earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Queens College. As a student, he sometimes shared a college radio program with Ayn Rand, the author and philosopher whose laissez-faire capitalism he would fiercely defend in street-corner debates in Greenwich Village.

After he volunteered in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, F. Clifton White, the architect of the Draft Goldwater movement, became his patron and recruited him to James Buckley’s Senate race in 1970 as the candidate of the fledgling Conservative Party.

Invoking Richard M. Nixon’s silent majority, Mr. Finkelstein encapsulated Mr. Buckley’s message in the catchphrase “Isn’t it time we had a senator?”

Mr. Buckley went on to defeat the Republican incumbent, Charles E. Goodell, and the Democratic challenger, Representative Richard L. Ottinger.

In 1972, Mr. Finkelstein founded the Westchester County-based Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates with his brother Ronald. In the 1976 presidential campaign, he was credited with helping Reagan, in an unsuccessful bid to deny President Gerald R. Ford the nomination, win crucial Republican primaries in North Carolina and Texas.

He later choreographed campaigns by his friend Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, against Rudolph W. Giuliani in the 1989 Republican mayoral primary; a referendum to impose term limits on New York City elected officials; and races in Eastern Europe and in Israel, where he was recruited by supporters of Mr. Netanyahu and other conservative candidates of the Likud Party.

In his work for Mr. Netanyahu, the incumbent prime minister, in 1999, Mr. Finkelstein took on the Labor Party challenger, Ehud Barak (who was being advised by the Democratic consultants James Carville, Bob Shrum and Stanley Greenberg), with the campaign slogan “Ehud Barak: Too Many Ambitions, Too Few Principles.”

Mr. Netanyahu was defeated in that campaign, but Mr. Finkelstein returned to Israel to help Ariel Sharon oust Mr. Barak and later re-elect Mr. Netanyahu, taking back power for the Likud Party.

“I would always say, ‘Arthur, do you realizes how much we’re changing history?’ ” his colleague George Birnbaum recalled. “He would say, ‘I don’t know how much we’re changing history; we’re touching history.’”

Philip Friedman, another political consultant, told The New York Times in 1994: “Finkelstein is the ultimate sort of Dr. Strangelove, who believes you can largely disregard what the politicians are going to say and do, what the newspapers are going to do, and create a simple and clear and often negative message, which, repeated often enough, can bring you to victory.”

Thanks largely to his brother’s financial discipline, the messenger’s firm prospered, too.

“Early in our friendship,” Craig Shirley recalled last January on nationalreview.com, “I asked him whether it was ‘Finkelsteen’ or ‘Finkelstine’ (with a long i), and Arthur characteristically replied, ‘If I was a poor Jew, it would be Finkelsteen, but since I am a rich Jew, it’s Finkelstine.”

Mr. Finkelstein was openly gay, although his sexual orientation was not common knowledge until it became the subject of an article in Boston Magazine in 1996. He married Donald Curiale, his partner of more than 50 years, in a civil ceremony in 2004.

His survivors include Mr. Curiale; their daughters, Jennifer Elizabeth Delgado and Molly Julia Baird-Kelly; a granddaughter; and his brothers, Ronald and Barry.

Mr. Finkelstein smoked heavily, loved to gamble and was habitually rumpled.

“He’d walk through the door carrying a poll tucked under his arm and take off his shoes and unfasten his tie, leaving the ends dangling, and start pacing up and down in his stocking feet,” Richard Morgan wrote in “The Fourth Witch” (2008), describing a strategy session of the National Congressional Club. “Then Tom Ellis would growl, ‘O.K., you’ve told me about the poll. Now tell me the ad,’ and without blinking Arthur would go into a kind of trance and just dictate a 30-second ad.”

Rarely photographed or interviewed, Mr. Finkelstein was unusually reflective during his 2011 public appearance in Prague, in which he discussed his accomplishments, the goals of negative campaigning and how television and the internet have altered politics since the eras of Goldwater, who remained one of his heroes, and Reagan.

“I went into this as a kid to change the world, because I was an absolute ideologue,” he said. “I would stand outside on soapboxes in Greenwich Village at 3 in the morning and argue with people about the nature of freedom.

“I said I wanted to change the world, I said I did, I made it worse,” he added, without amplifying and, perhaps, with a dollop of self-deprecation. “It wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/us/politics/arthur-finkelstein-innovative-influential-conservative-strategist-dies-at-72.html?mcubz=0>

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2019 Roll Call | Arthur Finkelstein reprised with GOP’s ‘socialists’ cries

By Stuart Rothenberg | April 30, 2019 | Roll Call

OPINION — If you’re on any Republican list, you’ve undoubtedly received emails from one of the GOP campaign committees or a Capitol Hill communications staffer calling the Democrats “socialists.” To those of us who were around in the 1980s and 1990s, that’s nothing new. We remember the late GOP campaign consultant Arthur Finkelstein’s strategy: Call your opponent a liberal again and again until voters believe it.

Finkelstein’s style was “unmistakable,” wrote Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post in 1996, “an avalanche of attack ads painting Democrats as ‘liberal,’ ‘ultraliberal,’ ‘embarrassingly liberal’ and ‘unbelievably liberal.’”

Each cycle, Finkelstein returned to his name-calling strategy, and each cycle, political reporters and handicappers rolled their eyes and snickered at his ads, which were as shallow and superficial as they were predictable. They were all about labeling and demonizing.

But in Finkelstein’s case, shallow didn’t necessarily mean ineffective. “Liberal” became a pejorative, and Finkelstein took advantage of that.

The consultant, who died in 2017, worked for a long list of high-profile and successful Republicans and conservatives, including Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Connie Mack of Florida, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York. He also worked for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After a while, Finkelstein’s strategy grew stale. Democrats wisely nominated a politically moderate Southerner in 1992 in Bill Clinton, and 12 consecutive years in the White House left the GOP with enough baggage to hand the presidency to the Democrats (albeit with a little help from Ross Perot).

Still, it’s undeniable that the liberal label has been an albatross around the necks of Democratic nominees for decades.

A successful strategy

Now, Republicans have raised the stakes by trying to brand the entire Democratic Party as advocating “socialism.”

Of course, the Democratic Party is a long way from being socialist, but the election of a few high-profile, self-declared Democratic socialists has given Republicans the hook they need to portray the entire party as “socialist.”

Defining Democrats as “liberals,” “progressives” or “socialists” is likely to continue to be a successful strategy for the GOP.

February’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found only 23 percent of respondents identified themselves as “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal,” compared to 38 percent who embraced the “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative” labels.

Of course, those numbers reflect how people see themselves, not where they actually fall on the ideological scale. But since people are more likely to pick a category they like over one with negative connotations, it is surely relevant that a strong plurality chose the conservative label over the liberal one.

As always, there is another side to the coin. The same February NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey asked respondents whether government should do “more things” (usually seen as a more liberal response) or whether it was already doing “too many things,” (the normally more conservative answer).

A surprising 55 percent of respondents said government should do more compared to only 41 percent who said it should do less. In fact, attitudes seem to be changing.

While Gallup recently found Americans age 30 and older continue to have a much more favorable view of capitalism than socialism, those aged 18-29 have a more favorable view of socialism. 

The right response

In the near term, Democrats need to figure out how to respond to the GOP’s attempts at branding the party of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Biden.

Do they merely laugh off the “socialism” charge, aggressively dismiss the characterization or look for a way to fight back, possibly by turning the tables on the party of Donald Trump, Steve King, Mike Pence and Sean Hannity?

One possible but very risky approach would be to link Trump and his party to an extreme form of conservative populism: fascism. But few Democratic candidates or officeholders would want to get into a name-calling war with the president, and equating Trump and GOP with fascism would likely be seen as demagoguery.

Fascism is such a loaded word — evoking images of Mussolini and Hitler — that it could generate a backlash, putting the Democrats on the defensive. The obvious answer is to create and repeatedly use a new term, possibly “Trumpism,” that describes the president’s attributes and behavior, from his narcissism and problem telling the truth to his crude language, his appointments of unqualified people and his demeaning of opponents. It would include his gentle treatment of dictators, especially compared with his attitude toward America’s allies, and his efforts to undermine key American institutions when it suits his purposes.

Of course, instead of looking for a new label to define the GOP, Democrats could simply fall back on their traditional attacks – including charging that Republican policies are dividing the country and are hurting children, seniors, women and racial minorities. Depending on where the economy is, those more traditional attacks might well be enough to keep Republicans on the defensive.

Perhaps the best way for Democrats to push back against the socialist label is the simplest — to nominate a pragmatic progressive who, on an issue or two, deviates from liberal orthodoxy and is more concerned with self-discipline, integrity, tolerance, and the ability to unite opponents of Donald Trump than with mere ideological purity.

That would make the GOP’s “socialism” charge both hollow and ineffective.

2019 Roll Call 

 Notes:

Was a protege of F. Clifton White

ARCHIVE OF FINKELSTEIN FILES - NATIONAL ARCHIVES

https://findingaids.loc.gov/exist_collections/ead3pdf/mss/2022/ms022002.pdf

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